Nicolas Lehuen's Weblog

Archive pour la catégorie ‘Yoono’

Yeah I know, I should have written this before going to the XTech 2006 conference in Amsterdam… But anyway, we saw some pretty interesting presentations, met nice people like Daniel Glazman, Tristan Nitot, Mike Shaver, Chuck Bearden and a bunch of other people, quite a pleasant crowd indeed. It was nice to get out of the wood and start explaining Yoono to new people, practicing my pretty poor english pronunciation.

This was a nice training for our trip to the Supernova 2006 conference in San Francisco (Yoono is a proud sponsor of the conference BTW . This time I’ll try to bring a slim enough digital camera ; in Amsterdam I couldn’t carry around my ante-diluvian Canon Powershot S30, it wouldn’t fit any of my pockets…

Aaahhhh, San Francisco… In 2000 I attended the JavaOne conference, and it was great. I love this city, I just hope this time we’ll manage to accomodate a few hours here and there to visit it more thoroughly.

Update : My press review URL is now found here. I’ve changed the URL below. Those are the odds and ends of being a beta-tester… On the other hand, I get to test a new feature which allows me to integrate an excerpt of my press review in the right column !

The latest Yoono version integrates a press review function. This allows you to comment on items from your favorite RSS feeds or entries from your bookmark in a fast and easy way. Whenever you read something of interest, a few mouse clicks and you can comment on it on your press review thanks to the integrated editor.

The result is an RSS feed with a (soon customizable) stylesheet : Nicolas Lehuen’s press review. I’ll use this press review function to quickly comment on links, this blog being the place where I really write things .

Coming soon in Yoono, a way to contribute to your already existing blog through this press review system. Yoono will use blogging APIs to directly post entries into your blog of choice.

Download it here. The bookmark sharing function uses del.icio.us as a web service ; I guess it’s time to think about integrating Yoono in Flock, too, through the already existing web service interface.

BTW, I was asked to do a little bit of Firefox extension development for Yoono. Dude, this development environment is weird.

Javascript is kinda cool, not so different from Python in essence (but totally different in syntax, of course), but Python is way cleaner, especially its object/class/metaclass model which is totally integrated with the non-OOP parts. Anyway, I’m using more and more Javascript at the moment, and writing an HTTP server that runs in Firefox was fun.

The very weird thing in Firefox is the emphasis on RDF ; when you want to manipulate bookmarks, instead of a no-brainer bookmark API, you have to jump through a whole series of hoops with RDF, arcs and whatnot. Generally speaking, it looks like some parts of Firefox where over-designed, its developer wanting to use as much kool-words as possible (think XML, RDF, XBL, XUL, XPCOM GUIDs à la Microsoft, DTD). The net result is a mix of different languages, sometimes interwoven in the same document thanks to the usage of horrid-looking XML namespaces.

Of course, it’s a nightmare to debug.

Digression : When I decided to stop following the xml-dev mailing list and worrying about XML, back in 2002, there was no way to properly define and validate a schema with built-in extensibility. For example, the buzz about XHTML is that you could make it extensible through the usage of foreign namespace, including MathML or SVG inside the XHTML document. Well, unless I’ve missed something, it’s possible, but you won’t find any validator that will validate both the XHTML part and the foreign embedded parts. That’s why I stated, along with Eric van der Vlist, that XML doesn’t deserve its « X » (good thing that I stopped xml-dev, years after I still get all angry and sweaty . I even gave a speech a the Technoforum XML conference to debunk that idea, much to the deception of the people organising the event (they were expecting some kind of praising for XHTML).

Ahem, coming back to real life : yeah, it’s a nightware to debug, because there is no way to check whether your XML or Javascript code is OK, except than by running it. At which point you have a choice of :

1. Firefox crashes : OK, the XML or Javascript code is definitely no good. But you don’t know where or why, just scrape your eyes and try to find it by yourself. Fortunately, Firefox decides to run is « safe mode » and deactivate your extension the next time you run it. Phew.
2. (when you try to write XUL overlays) The Firefox UI is totally messed up. Somewhere in the UI you get a rectangle with the beginning of an error message in red, but unfortunately since this rectangle doesn’t have a scrollbar, the interesting parts (like the file name and line number where the error is) are not visible. Just edit your file, find the error by yourself and retry.
3. (when you try to write handlers in Javascript) Your Javascript code seems not to work. Well, pal, it’s probably because you have a syntax error in your code. That’s right, a syntax error, silently ignored, which just make the Javascript interpreter stop parsing your source file, so a bunch of declaration are just ignored. The hint here is that sometimes the interpreter will complain in the Javascript console that some function is missing. Now you know that the error is somewhere above this function.

And the best part is that the whole edit/build extension/install extension/test cycle is a mess, because the install part cannot be automated, you have to manually uninstall the previous version of the extension (though I have found that it’s not always required), drag/drop the extension file, wait TWO seconds in front of the confirmation dialog until you are allowed to click OK, close Firefox and restart it.

Now, I know that I have not gathered enough experience to have the proper tools at hand. It looks like there is a hack which allows automatic extension installation. And there is the Venkman Javascript Debugger which I could almost use. But hell, why must it be so darn medieval ? Maybe I’m spoiled now that I’m accustomed to having nice stack traces when something goes wrong, but even the Locomotive Basic on my Amstrad CPC 6128 gave me the line number of any syntax error !

That’s all the more sad as the Mozilla platform is very interesting. It’s a portable GUI platform with a lot of network components. It’s quite fast, too, I mean, given the behemoth that it carries. The HTTP server I wrote in Javascript holds 200 requests a second, which gives you a hint about the quality of the Javascript interpreter and the underlying XPCOM objects. It’s asynchronous (look, Pa, no threading !) and it’s less than 100 lines of code (most of which have been cutted/pasted from the web and refactored a little bit, of course). XUL is cool once you’ve put your hands on a good documentation (I recommend the one from XulPlanet). And the platform will become independent from Mozilla with XulRunner. So I guess that this Frankenstein’s monster is here to stay, and that I’d better get used to all its idiosyncrasies.

Coming back to Flock, I’m pretty admirative of the courage of these guys. I guess they experience all those annoyances daily. They’re pros, so they must have come up with tools, best practive and all, but this musn’t have been a bed of roses. Kudos to their team !

My friend Laurent Quérel has eventually launched yoono.com after a few years of hard thinking and a little more than one year of development with his team. I’m kinda on the advisory board (well, I’ve got a few tenth of percent of shares, that is , so I’m quite happy to see the product out at last.

The web site is in French only for the moment, but the English version is going online Real Soon Now^TM. In the mean time, let me explain what Yoono does.

I suppose you already know del.icio.us or Yahoo! MyWeb ? Well, Yoono is also about sharing bookmarks to help you search high-quality sites, except that Yoono users don’t need to tag their bookmarks.

You see, tagging is soooo 2005 . Seriously, tagging has been proven to have a lot of problems, the first one being a convergence problem : different people tend to tag things differently (« should I tag this under bookmark, bookmarks or favorites ?« ), with different words (especially since people tend to speak different languages). This leads to the balkanization of knowledge and the difficulty to find the right tag which can give you an answer to a particular question.

Yoono solves this problem by automatically inferring a classification of bookmarks from a statistical analysis of the bookmarks of its users. The core idea is that when two bookmarks are classified together (in the same folder) by a lot of Yoono users, then you may be interested in the second one when you bookmark the first. It’s exactly what Amazon.com does when you order something (« Other customers have also bought…« ), and it’s called collaborative filtering.

So what’s the user experience ? Well, all you have to do is install the Yoono Companion, a Win32 application (other platforms are planned) which will run in the tray area on your task bar. You can then keep on using Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox as usual, you don’t need to change the way you use your favorite browser’s bookmarking system. No need to use a crappy web interface when your browser has everything built-in ! Each time you bookmark a site of interest, the Yoono Companion is notified, requests a set of suggestion from the Yoono server, and a small bubble window appears on your desktop with those suggestions. That’s all.

But that’s only the beginning. By default, you’re totally anonymous. The Yoono Companion sends your bookmark to the server (you can of course opt out all or part of your bookmark, keeping some areas for private use), but nothing more. We don’t know who you are, we don’t even request a login/password, email address or anything ! This way, you anonymously contribute to the global knowledge of the Yoono community of users. But if you want, you can create a profile and actively publish your bookmarks. People can suscribe to your bookmark folders, and be notified when you add something to them. And if you have a big enough audience, who knows, you might be given the expert status and be suggested to other Yoono users when they look for expertise in your field.

Yoono also integrates the concepts of bookmarks and RSS feeds. When you bookmark a site, it’s because you want to come back to it later, right ? And when you suscribe to an RSS feed, it’s usually to come back to the site to read some new content. Well, why not bookmark your RSS feeds and use Yoono as a full-blown RSS reader ? No need to maintain two separate lists of bookmarks and RSS feeds, Yoono integrates both and gives you a neat way of being always up to date.

That’s not the end of it, but the web site will soon contain a lot of information in English, so I’ll stop there. Amongst the features I leave aside are a Firefox extension, a synchronization system which allow you to always have your bookmarks and RSS feeds at hand everywhere, out-of-band forums and much more !

Yoono is currently in its beta phase with a small set of users, so please, if you notice anything weird, do not hesitate to tell us !